I Am Pilgrim (5 page)

As I’d come very late to this particular party, I had to make an instant decision – no time to seek

advice, no second guessing. I caught up with our officer when he was on his way to meet his Russian

contact. And yes, that was the first man I ever killed.

I shot him – I shot the Rider of the Blue dead in Red Square, a vicious wind howling out of the steppes, hot, carrying with it the smell of Asia and the stench of betrayal. I don’t know if this is anything to be proud of but, even though I was young and inexperienced, I killed my boss like a professional.

I shadowed him to the southern edge of the square, where a children’s carousel was turning. I figured the blaring sound of its recorded music would help mask the flat retort of a pistol shot. I came in at him from an angle – this man I knew well, and he saw me only at the last moment.

A look of puzzlement crossed his face, almost instantly giving way to fear. ‘Eddy—’ he said. My

real name wasn’t Eddy but, like everybody else in the agency, I had changed my identity when I first went out into the field. I think it made it easier, as if it weren’t really me who was doing it.

‘Something wrong – what are you doing here?’ He was from the south, and I’d always liked his accent.

I just shook my head. ‘Vyshaya mera,’ I said. It was an old KGB expression we both knew that literally meant ‘the highest level of punishment’ – a euphemism for putting a large-calibre bullet through the back of someone’s head.

I already had my hand on the gun in my hip pocket – a slimline PSM 5.45; ironically, a Soviet design, especially made to be little thicker than a cigarette lighter. It meant you could carry it with barely a wrinkle in the jacket of a well-cut suit. I saw his panicky eyes slide to the kids riding the carousel, probably thinking about his own two little ones, wondering how it ever got this crazy.

Without taking the gun out of my pocket, I pulled the trigger – firing a steel-core bullet able to penetrate the thirty layers of Kevlar and half an inch of titanium plate in the bulletproof vest I assumed he was wearing.

Nobody heard a sound above the racket of the carousel.

The bullet plunged into his chest, the muzzle velocity so high it immediately sent his heart into shock, killing him instantly – just like it was designed to do. I put my arm out, catching him as he fell, using my hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, acting as if my companion had just passed out

from the heat.

I half carried him to a plastic seat under a flapping, unused sunshade, speaking in halting Russian to the clutch of mothers waiting ten yards away for their children, pointing at the sky, complaining about the weather.

They smiled, secretly pleased to have it confirmed once again that the Slavs were strong and the Americans weak: ‘Ah, the heat – terrible, yes,’ they said sympathetically.

I took off the Rider ’s jacket and put it on his lap to hide the reddening hole. I called to the mothers again, telling them I was leaving him momentarily while I went for a cab.

They nodded, more interested in their kids on the carousel than in what I was doing. I doubt any of

them even realized I was carrying his briefcase – let alone his wallet – as I hurried towards the taxis on Kremlevskiy Prospekt.

I was already entering my hotel room several miles away before anyone noticed the blood trickling

from the corner of his mouth and called the cops. I hadn’t had the chance to empty all his pockets, so I knew it wouldn’t be long before they identified him.

On visits to London I’d had dinner at his home and played with his kids – two girls who were in

their early years at school – many times, and I counted down the minutes to when I guessed the phone would ring at his house in Hampstead and they’d get the news their father was dead. Thanks to my own childhood, I had a better idea than most how that event would unfold for a child – the wave of

disbelief, the struggle to understand the finality of death, the flood of panic, the yawning chasm of abandonment. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop the scene from playing out in my head – the visuals were of them, but I’m afraid the emotion was mine.

At last I sat on the bed and broke the lock on his briefcase. The only thing of interest I found was a music DVD with Shania Twain on the cover. I put it in the drive of my laptop and ran it through an

algorithm program. Hidden in the digitized music were the names and classified files of nineteen Russians who were passing secrets to us. Vyshaya mera to them if the Rider had made the drop.

As I worked through the files, looking at the personal data in the nineteen files, I started to keep a tally of the names of all the Russian kids I encountered. I hadn’t meant to, but I realized I was drawing up a sort of profit-and-loss account. By the end there were fourteen Russian children in one column, the Rider ’s two daughters in the other. You could say it had been a good exchange by any reckoning.

But it wasn’t enough: the names of the Russians were too abstract and the Rider ’s children far too real.

I picked up my coat, swung my overnight bag on to my shoulder, pocketed the PSM 5.45 and headed to a playground near Gorky Park. I knew from the files that some of the wives of our Russian

assets often took their kids there in the afternoon. I sat on a bench and, from the descriptions I had read, I identified nine of the women for sure, their children building sandcastles on a make-believe beach.

I walked forward and stared at them – I doubt they even noticed the stranger with a burn hole in his jacket looking through the railing – these smiling kids whose summers I hoped would now last

longer than mine ever did. And while I had managed to make them real, I couldn’t help thinking that, in the measure of what I had given to them, by equal measure I had lost part of myself. Call it my innocence.

Feeling older but somehow calmer, I walked towards a row of taxis. Several hours earlier – as I had hurried towards my hotel room after killing the Rider – I had made an encrypted call to Washington, and I knew that a CIA plane, flying undercover as a General Motors executive jet, was en route to the city’s Sheremetyevo airport to extract me.

Worried that the Russian cops had already identified me as the killer, the ride to the airport was one of the longest journeys of my life, and it was with overwhelming relief that I stepped on board the jet.

My elation lasted about twelve seconds. Inside were four armed men who declined to reveal who they

were but had the look of some Special Forces unit.

They handed me a legal document and I learned I was now the subject of the intelligence community’s highest inquiry – a Critical Incident Investigation – into the killing. The leader of the group told me we were flying to America.

He then read me my rights and placed me under arrest.

Chapter Seven

MY BEST GUESS was Montana. As I looked out the window of the jet there was something in the cut of

the hills that made me almost certain we were in the north-west. There was nothing else to distinguish the place – just an airstrip so secret it consisted of a huddle of unmarked bunkers, a dozen underground hangars and miles of electrified fence.

We had flown through the night, and by the time we landed – just after dawn – I was in a bad frame

of mind. I’d had plenty of opportunity to turn things over in my head and the doubts had grown with

each passing mile. What if the Shania Twain DVD was a fake, or somebody had planted it on the Rider? Maybe he was running a sting operation I didn’t know about – or another agency was using

him to give the enemy a raft of disinformation. And what about this? Perhaps the investigators would claim it was my DVD and the Rider had unmasked
me
as the traitor. That explained why I had to shoot him dead with no consultation.

I was slipping even further into the labyrinth of doubt as the Special Ops guys bustled me off the

plane and into an SUV with blackened windows. The doors locked automatically and I saw the handles

inside had been removed. It had been five years since I had first joined the secret world and now, after three frantic days in Moscow, everything was on the line.

For two hours we drove without leaving the confines of the electrified fence, coming to a stop at

last at a lonely ranch house surrounded by a parched lawn.

Restricted to two small rooms and forbidden any contact except with my interrogators, I knew that

in another wing of the house a dozen forensic teams would be going through my life with a fine-toothed comb – the Rider ’s too – trying to find the footprints of the truth. I also knew how they’d interview me – but no amount of practice sessions during training can prepare you for the reality of being worked over by hostile interrogators.

Four teams worked in shifts, and I say it without editorial comment, purely as a matter of record:

the women were the worst – or the best – depending on your point of view. The shapeliest of them appeared to think that by leaving the top of her shirt undone and leaning forward she would somehow

get closer to the truth. Wonderbra, I called her. It would be the same sort of method used, years later, with great effect on the Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

I understood the theory – it was a reminder of the world you hungered for, the world of pleasure,

far removed from the place of constant anxiety. All you had to do was cooperate. And let me just say, it works. Hammered about details night and day as they search for any discrepancy, you’re tired –

weary to the bone. Two weeks of it and you’re longing for another world – any world.

Late one night, after twelve hours without pause, I asked Wonderbra: ‘You figure I planned it all –

and I shot him on the edge of Red Square?
Red Square?
Why would I do that?’

‘Stupid, I guess,’ she said evenly.

‘Where did they recruit you – Hooters?!’ I yelled. For the first time, I’d raised my voice: it was a mistake; now the team of analysts and psychologists watching via the hidden cameras would know they were getting to me.

Instantly I hoped she would return service, but she was a professional – she kept her voice calm, just leaned even further forward, the few buttons on her shirt straining: ‘They’re natural and it’s no credit to the bra in case you’re wondering. What song was the carousel playing?’

I forced the anger to walk away. ‘I’ve already told you.’

‘Tell us again.’

‘“Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I’m serious, this is modern Russia; nothing makes sense.’

‘You’d heard it before?’ she said.

‘Of course I’d heard it before, it’s Nirvana.’

‘In the square, I mean, when you scouted locations—?’

‘There was no scouting, because there was no plan,’ I told her quietly, a headache starting in my left temple.

When they finally let me go to bed, I felt she was winning. No matter how innocent you are, that’s a bad thing to think when you’re in an isolated house, clinging to your freedom, as good as lost to the world.

Early the next morning – Wednesday by my figuring, but in fact a Saturday, that’s how disoriented

I’d become – the door to my sleeping area was unlocked and the handler hung a clean set of clothes

on the back of it. He spoke for the first time and offered me a shower instead of the normal body wash in a basin in the corner. I knew this technique too – make me think they were starting to believe me, encourage me to trust them – but by this stage I was pretty well past caring about the psychology of it all. Like Freud might have said: sometimes a shower ’s still a shower.

The handler unlocked a door into an adjoining bathroom and left. It was a white room, clinical, ring bolts in the ceiling and walls that hinted at a far darker purpose, but I didn’t care. I shaved, undressed and let the water flood down. As I was getting dry, I caught sight of myself naked in a full-length mirror and stopped – it was strange, I hadn’t really looked at myself for a long time.

I’d lost about twenty pounds in the three weeks or whatever it was I had been at the ranch and I couldn’t remember ever seeing my face look more haggard. It made me appear a lot older, and I stared at it for a time, as if it were a window into the future. I wasn’t ugly: I was tall and my hair was salted with blond thanks to the European summer.

With the extra pounds stripped off my waist and butt thanks to the investigation, I was in good shape

– not with the six-pack-ab vanity of a movie star but with the fitness that came from practising forty minutes of Krav Maga every day. An Israeli system of self-defence it is, according to people who know, the most highly regarded form of unarmed combat among New York drug dealers north of 140th Street. I always figured if it was good enough for the professionals, it was good enough for me.

One day, several years in the future – alone and desperate – it would save my life.

As I stood close to the mirror, taking inventory of the man I saw before me, wondering if I really

liked him that much, it occurred to me I might not be the only one watching. Wonderbra and her friends were probably on the other side of the glass, conducting their own appraisal. I may not be on top of anyone’s list for male lead in
Deep Throat II
, but I didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. No, it wasn’t that which made me angry – it was the intrusion into every part of my life, the endless search for evidence that did not exist, the soul-destroying conviction that nobody could do something simply because they thought it was right.